In January, HRH Princess Beatrice shared the joyful news that she and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi had welcomed a baby girl, Athena, a baby sister for three-year-old Sienna. What the world did not know is that the family’s happy announcement followed weeks of intense worry, after Beatrice learned her daughter was likely to arrive prematurely. Here, she reflects on her pregnancy journey—and how she’s redoubling her efforts to spotlight the importance of research to improving female health outcomes—in a personal essay for Vogue.
Nothing quite prepares you for the moment when you realize your baby is going to arrive early. There’s so little control. Will she arrive healthy? Will there be complications? How will you juggle the rest of family life while trying to keep a tiny human safe and well?
You know that when your baby arrives the doctors and midwives are going to be there, doing everything they can to ensure she makes it through those challenging first few days. But you have no idea how these things will play out, what happens next. The uncertainty leaves you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown.
My second daughter, Athena Elizabeth Rose, was born on January 22. I learnt so much from this pregnancy journey—the latter stages of which I spent with all of these questions spinning through my mind. Following routine scans we became aware our precious cargo needed close monitoring, and understood we needed to prepare for an early arrival. What I learnt in this process has been humbling: understanding so much more about our remarkable human bodies, but also, more than anything, what we don’t know.
In many ways, for the longest time, women’s health has been left off the agenda. You can try and plan as much as possible with pregnancy, but sometimes your body—or your baby—has other ideas, which in some cases can lead to a premature birth. Thankfully, with ever evolving technology in the hands of knowledgeable doctors, midwives and nurses, more progress is being made every day towards understanding the unique complications that can accompany a premature pregnancy.
I’d describe myself as a technology optimist, and my career to date has been focused on how research and better data analytics can offer tools to those in search of a deeper understanding. With this experience in mind—and following on from my own pregnancy journey—I’ve found myself in the position of being a passionate new mother who wants to work to find answers for women globally. I want to do all I can to reassure those families whose babies might arrive early that they are not alone.
It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’ve come from, so many elements of pregnancy are universal. I’ve had a life that is out of the ordinary, but my joys and fears in pregnancy and motherhood are the same as those experienced by millions of other women around the world. Like countless other expectant mums, I lay awake in the weeks leading up to birth, trying to monitor each movement of the baby in my tummy and asking myself a thousand times: “What if this happens, or what if that happens?”
I was very fortunate to be monitored closely by a medical team and I’m extremely aware of how lucky I am. This is a driving force in me to do as much as possible to help where I can. Athena arrived healthy, a few weeks before her due date. She was so tiny it took more than a few weeks for the tears of relief to dry and for life with our healthy baby to feel real. Her feet were so small – almost the same size as the paws on one of my older daughter’s soft bunnies.
I’m extremely pleased to let you know Athena is now doing really well, I have a few more answers as to what happened, but still no precise explanation. Looking back over those months of sheer worry, I am filled with a sense of determination that more can be done to help others find answers to those questions around the complications that can lead to preterm birth – questions that defined my days (and nights) during pregnancy.
I was fortunate to be able to turn to a remarkable team at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and the oversight of Professor Mark Johnson. I first learnt about his work through friends who are supporters of Borne, the organization he founded with the mission of ending premature birth. I am now a patron of Borne, a very personal appointment that—as with lots of the organizations I support—I take great pride in. They say a problem shared is a problem halved, and as with my work around dyslexia, I hope to do as much as possible to support others like me.
Preterm birth affects so many families, leaving them faced with the very same challenges I found myself confronting. During this time, I found comfort in being as open as possible with family, friends and even other mums at the school gates, and in trying to learn as much as I could. So often we don’t take the time to share – especially when it comes to our pregnancy or our health in general. Once you start, you quickly come to realize that everyone has a story, and often, on some level, a shared experience of birth. It brings people together.
It is in that spirit of togetherness that I have teamed up with one of my oldest friends, Alice Naylor-Leyland, to create a new baby shower collection for her brand Mrs Alice, the proceeds of which will benefit Borne. Mrs Alice is all about bringing people together around a table to encourage joyful moments, and this collection came about after long, late-night discussions around fertility, surrogacy, pregnancy and motherhood. Our hope is that it will inspire a conversation around women’s health.
Maybe it’s to do with getting a little older, and hopefully a little wiser—or maybe it’s something to do with my mother’s breast and skin cancer diagnosis last year—but for me, nothing feels more vital than facilitating the necessary research into the health challenges that women face daily. My hope is that with more investment into medical research, and the dedication of healthcare professionals like Professor Johnson, my two daughters will not have to face these challenges when they grow up. And even if they do, they’ll be doing it with the absolute best knowledge at their disposal.
